New ways to engage customers in co-designing your company's future - a weblog to complement the book, Outside Innovation, by Patty Seybold

Description

What is Outside Innovation?

It’s when customers lead the design of your business processes, products, services, and business models. It’s when customers roll up their sleeves to co-design their products and your business. It’s when customers attract other customers to build a vital customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services.
The good news is that customer-led innovation is one of the most predictably successful innovation processes.
The bad news is that many managers and executives don’t yet believe in it. Today, that’s their loss. Ultimately, it may be their downfall.

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Observations

LEAD USERS

Eric von Hippel coined the term "lead users" to describe a group of both customers and non-customers who are passionate about getting certain things accomplished. They may not know or care about the products or services you offer. But they do care about their project or need. Lead users have already explored innovative ways to get things done. They're usually willing to share their approaches with others.

LEAD CUSTOMERS

I use the term "lead customers" to describe the small percentage of your current customers who are truly innovative. These may not be your most vocal customers, your most profitable customers, or your largest customers. But they are the customers who care deeply about the way in which your products or services could help them achieve something they care about.

LEAD CUSTOMERS AND LEAD USERS

We’ve spent the last 25 years identifying, interviewing, selecting, and grouping customers together to participate in our Customer Scenario® Mapping sessions. Over the years, we’ve learned how to identify the people who will contribute the most to a customer co-design session. These are the same kinds of people you should be recruiting when you set out to harness customer-led innovation.

HOW DO YOU WIN IN INNOVATION?

You no longer win by having the smartest engineers and scientists; you win by having the smartest customers!

CUSTOMER CO-DESIGN

In more than 25 years of business strategy consulting, we’ve found that customer co-design is a woefully under-used capability.

March 12, 2012

I am not a conspiracy theorist, I don’t view the world pessimistically, and I’m not particularly paranoid, but after reading Patty Seybold’s article this week on Facebook privacy and her earlier article on Google’s privacy policies, I’m starting to look over my (virtual) shoulder.

For years, I have been dismayed at the abandon with which people (primarily teens to young adults) have posted very personal and oft embarrassing things on MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube for the whole world to see. I worry that the nasty posts to ex-boyfriends/girlfriends will come back to bite them in the butts. Putting up that photo of yourself carousing with a bunch of drunken friends in Caligula-like costumes will be referenced at the most inappropriate times, like a job interview or a presidential campaign.

March 06, 2012

USING GOOGLE SEARCH, EMAIL, AND OTHER APPS WHEN LOGGED INTO A FREE GOOGLE ACCOUNT. If I were to design a Google Privacy Disclosure Quiz, to better educate consumers about what the risks are, here are the questions I would include about what information about ourselves we trade when we use Google’s free advertising-supported applications:

1. When I have a free consumer account at Google, what user profile information does Google collect and retain about me?

a. First Name, Last Name, Email address b. Gender, Age c. Phone Number d. Credit Card number and billing address (if I use Google Checkout) e. Who my contacts are f. Who I have included in my Google+ Circles g. All of the above h. Some of the above (only a thru d)